Pirates, cowboys and music's wild frontier

In honest moments, most Europeans will admit that they envy the American notion of the frontier.

The frontier’s importance was defined by the 19th-century American historian Frederick Jackson Turner, who eulogised the Wild West as “a gate of escape from the bondage of the past”. Yet as settlers ran out of space to colonise, life became more ordered. The money economy spread, bringing order and domesticity in its wake. In a nostalgic reflex, cowboys and cavalrymen became cultural icons long after the demise of the conditions that sustained them.

Like the Wild West at the end of its glory days, the web still has the power to galvanise settlers. But we’re also witnessing the rise of peacemakers who trust above all else in the pacifying effects of the money economy.

Hans Padeya may well qualify as one of them.

Not so long ago, Padeya was running a 50,000-circulation classified rag called Bargain Pages in the West Midlands. This week, Padeya – transplanted to Sweden as chief executive of Global Gaming Factory X – announced his intention to acquire The Pirate Bay, the site that aggregates illegal content on behalf of 20 million users worldwide.

Admittedly, if you’ve got a burning ambition to pacify the Wild West, serving up ads to a bunch of Swedish internet cafes isn’t the most promising place to start.

Regardless, Padeya is promising to pay “content providers and copyright owners” for downloads. At the very least, this will involve lengthy negotiations – assuming, of course, that the record labels and studios are willing to talk in the first place.

Meanwhile, millions of Pirate Bay users will continue – in the words of co-founder Peter Sunde – to “shit massive bricks”. As users delete their accounts at a whirlwind pace, The Pirate Bay’s attractions as an advertising play – not lost on Padeya – are diminishing by the day.

Certainly, the “new data distribution technology” being developed by Peerialism, Padeya’s other acquisition, sounds interesting. Yet the company’s site suggests that it might be happier churning out academic papers than working on real-life deployments. As for Padeya’s plan to flog users’ bandwidth to ISPs, this has been met with bemusement. Why should carriers pay to purchase network capacity that they created in the first place?

So the questions continue. But if Hans Padeya’s endgame is mysterious, the motives of Pirate Bay’s founders are no less inscrutable. After carrying a huge burden for so long, it wouldn’t be surprising if the site’s founders wanted a graceful exit.

But nothing is simple when you’re dealing with settlers. Among other things, co-founder Peter Sunde has been dropping sideways hints that seem to contradict Padeya’s stated intentions.

“If the new owners will screw around with the site, nobody will keep using it,” Sunde announced on The Pirate Bay blog on Tuesday. “That's the biggest insurance one can have that the site will be run in the way that we all want to.”

More curious still was an intervention on a bulletin board, reputedly made by krs, a now-departed co-founder of The Pirate Bay. krs suggested that users should anticipate “a new setup” that will be “practically impossible to take down or find anyone liable to sue” [sic].

In a separate message, krs added this thought: “Yes they will change business model drastically. From being a torrent host and tracker they will now buy services from a tracker company and from a torrent host company and syndicate this on the website.”

Surveying all of this, it’s easy to shrug. The Pirate Bay resembles many others that went before, including Napster, Grokster and Kazaa.

Almost certainly, the job of legitimising illegal downloads will overwhelm Hans Padeya. Meanwhile, in double-quick time, another facilitator of illegal downloads will rise to take the Bay’s place in the affections of millions of users.

The odds on these things happening are short. Yet despite this, the idea that underpins this apparently crazy acquisition may yet prove durable. Monetising piracy feels like an idea whose time has come.

Billy Bragg is among those who argue that music labels should start working with the grain of P2P distribution, rather than against it. “The next generation of music fans may no longer want to pay for music, but they are still hungry to hear it,” Bragg wrote recently in the Guardian. “The challenge to the industry is to find ways to monetise their behaviour. Clearly, some form of P2P subscription service is the way forward.”

The ageing folkster isn’t alone. At SXSW in March, for example, one panel discussed the possibility of capitalising upon the widespread distribution of pirated material.

"Piracy used to be sad, but now it's a bonus – it means more distribution," said Eric Boyd of Mochi Media, a start-up that tracks the proliferation of Flash-based games across the web.

The notion has continued to bubble up toward the surface of debate. At a conference hosted by the British Screen Advisory Council in April, a Time Warner executive surprised some delegates by suggesting that pirates could be induced to become affiliate sales channels.

More recently, a group of music industry renegades have launched A Price For Music, a glossy site that aims to prove the economic case for ISPs and music labels collaborating to embrace – and supersede – the attractions of piracy.

The notion is eye-catching if only because of its affinity with Microsoft’s perennially successful embrace-and-extend strategy.

Arguments like these have started to result in interesting initiatives, including Virgin Media’s plans to offerunlimited downloads to its customers. Step by step, ISPs and the record labels seem to be understanding the need to sell music as a service, rather than a product. Offering to replicate what users like about file-sharing – and improving the experience – is a logical extension of the same approach.

Of course, hardcore illegal downloaders will continue to race toward the frontier’s furthest edge. They will deploy encryption and disperse their efforts to avoid deep-packet inspection. In this respect, their approach is straight out of the history books. As Frederick Jackson Turner noted, the further the settlers travelled westward, the ruder, cruder and more ingenious their survivalist techniques became.

Yet in the settled territories behind the frontier’s great curve, research strongly suggests that legalised P2P services could prove attractive to many users.

Accordingly, we may be witnessing the start of something different: an effort to popularise norms that are more civic, more predictable, more amendable to the money economy. Under any new dispensation, cowboys will still be allowed to dress up in their gear, but the quantum of lawlessness they perpetrate will steadily decline.

Hans Padaya’s immediate quest might prove fruitless. But he’s on the right track.

The history of the frontier ends not with the bang of total conquest, or the whimper of surrender. It ends, instead, with a series of compromises – risky at first, but increasingly durable – between cowboys, pirates and established commercial interests.

Edited by Holden Frith

Comments

There is an alternative to music piracy: the Creative Commons community, where thousands of free albums are available to download, copy and share with the full approval of the artists who made the stuff in the first place.